At present, many (mobile) network operators such as VODAFONE™ SFR™, AT&T™, SPRINT™, VERIZON™, MOBILE TELESYSTEMS™, T-MOBILE™ have launched femtocell-based applications and/or services within their networks. For mobile network operators, a femtocell may improve coverage and/or capacity, in particular indoors. Users may benefit from improved coverage and potentially better voice quality and/or battery life.
In telecommunications, a femtocell relates to a small, low-power access point such as a cellular base station, substantially designed for use in a small local area, particularly indoors such as at home and/or in an enterprise. A femtocell may be a subset of a smallcell which requires a specific hardware so that existing WiFi and/or DSL routers may not be upgraded to femtocell. A femtocell substantially connects to a mobile operator network via broadband (e.g. DSL, cable). Femtocells may be sold by a mobile network operator to its residential customers and/or enterprise customers (hereinafter referred to as users). A femtocell is substantially the size of a residential gateway or smaller and connects to the user's broadband line (e.g. DSL, cable). Integrated femtocells, which may include both a router and a femtocell, are also available.
Once plugged in, a femtocell may connect to the mobile operator network and provides extra coverage and/or capacity. From a user's perspective, it is plug-and-play there is no specific installation and/or technical knowledge required so that anyone can install a femtocell in a specific local area such as at home. Usually, the user then declares which mobile phone numbers are allowed to connect to the plugged-in femtocell. This may be done via a web interface provided by the mobile network operator through the femtocell. When mobile devices operating under at least one of the registered numbers arrive under coverage of the femtocell, they switch over from a macrocell to the femtocell automatically. A macrocell is a cell in a mobile operator network that provides radio coverage served by a high power cellular base station (which is also referred to as a tower).
Currently available designs may support two to four active user devices such as mobile phones, smart phones, tablets, PCs, notebooks, etc. in a residential setting and eight to 16 active user devices in enterprise settings, for example. A femtocell may allow service providers to extend service coverage indoors and/or at the cell edge, for example where access would otherwise be limited and/or unavailable.
Users and/or mobile network operators may benefit from femtocells. Femtocells may provide improved cellular coverage, capacity and/or applications for homes and/or enterprises as well as metropolitan and/or rural public spaces. Such applications are referred to as femtocell-based applications. Femtocell-based applications substantially allow user devices and/or network applications to benefit from the cheap and fast data connections and location-awareness provided by femtocells. In femtocell-based applications, a femtocell may act as a portal to in-home services and/or automation with high-bandwidth connected-home applications and thereby delivering presence, context, and/or location in such applications. Examples of femtocell-based applications may include home security with secure home access, virtual home phones, virtual fridge notes, etc. In a secure home femtocell-based application, the application might be operable to detect presence of unknown mobile devices, to turn on high definition security cameras, to alert the user via SMS and/or to send automatically send an alert to the policy, to create log of user devices, etc.
Femtocells may provide offload of Radio Access Network (RAN) Mobile: User may use femtocells as an alternative to the macro radio network because the signal is stronger at their point of use. Femtocells enable a new breed of mobile services that exploits the technology's ability to detect presence, connect and/or interact with existing networks. Femtocells emit low levels of radio waves, also known as Radio Frequency (RF) electromagnetic fields in use.
In order to speed up service and/or application development the Small Cell Forum has published a series of application programming interfaces, APIs, which address issues related to lack of standardization among femtocells. Femtocell standards for UMTS (release 8); LTE (release 9), CDMA, and/or WiMac are developed.
Although different standardization attempts to femtocells exist, however, no standards exists for supporting developers, administrators, and/or users in efficient, easy, flexible, but standardized, techniques for femtocell-based application development and/or management which may be useful to manage technical issues such as the variety of network topologies femtocells may be designed to interact with, the poor presence information provided by many models of femtocells, which may be limited to the International Mobile Subscriber Identity, IMSI, and/or prevents the development of advanced application, the management of non-standardized femtocells already deployed. In other words, no standard way for managing a femtocell-based application's whole lifecycle exists.
Hence, there is a need to provide systems and methods for standardization of application and/or service development for femtocell networks.